Fantasy books are full of epic battles like the Battle of Helm’s Deep from Lord of the Rings. And for most fans just reading about such battles is enough, but some fans go further, enlisting in the military in order to live out real-life adventures. One of them is Weston Ochse, a thirty-year military vet who still works with the military, traveling regularly to warzones in countries like Afghanistan. He traces his yearning for adventure back to reading The Hobbit as a child.

“That desire was definitely inculcated by the idea that one lone hobbit can make a difference,” Ochse says in Episode 143 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “And if one lone hobbit can make a difference, then this poor guy from Tennessee can make a difference too. So absolutely it was inspirational.”

Ochse now draws on his military experience to write his own fantasy novels, such as the SEAL Team 666 series, which is currently in development at MGM, with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson attached to star.

Another fantasy author who is also a military vet is Myke Cole, author of the Shadow Ops series. As a child he was a “scrawny nerd,” and he credits fantasy novels and Dungeons & Dragons with inspiring him to become a warrior.

“Your first step to changing who you are is imagining what you want to be,” he says. “And fantasy was the thing that gave me the tools to pretend, to imagine that I could be a knight, until one day I was actually able to do it.”

Cole and Ochse both appear in Operation Arcana, a new anthology of military fantasy edited by Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy producer John Joseph Adams (read an excerpt from the anthology here). He likes the military fantasy genre because it lets authors depict the realities of military life using symbol and metaphor.

“It gives you the opportunity to place soldiers in situations where they have to figure out how to deal with the impossible,” says Adams. “Because I think that we ask soldiers to do that kind of thing on a regular basis, and so I think that one of the things that military fantasy allows you to do is literalize that and have some fun with it.”

Another favorite of both Cole and Ochse is George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, the basis for the HBO series Game of Thrones. And though Martin isn’t a military veteran, his extensive research into medieval warfare lets him write characters that Cole and Ochse find both authentic and inspiring.

“When Rear Admiral Acton commissioned me,” says Cole, “and I raised my right hand to say the oath, in the back of my mind I was saying the words of the Night’s Watch— ‘I am the sword in the darkness, I am the watcher on the walls, I am the shield that guards the realms of men.’ I really did that, consciously, and it was sort of my nod to my nerd roots, as I assumed my mantle as a warrior in real life.”

Listen to our complete interview with Weston Ochse, Myke Cole, and John Joseph Adams in Episode 143 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Myke Cole on officers vs. grunts:

“There is far less of a division between a member of the officer class and an enlisted person now than there has ever been in the history of armed conflict, including in Tolkien’s day when he was serving. I’ll give you an example. I once did joint exercises with the Saudis, and Saudi officers are royalty, just like they were in the medieval world that Tolkien was describing. And I had a Saudi guy hand me his rucksuck and tell me to hump it, because he was an officer and they don’t carry rucksacks. And there was this moment of cultural disconnect, where I had to tell him, ‘Sorry man, you need to carry your own rucksack—I don’t care who you are—because we do things differently in America.’ But it was this incredible realization of, wow, I’m really interacting with a medieval society, for whom these things are normal. … And that’s why Aragorn was such a revolutionary character. He is this king who is willing to go out an be a ranger.”

“I’d like to make sure that people are acknowledging Naomi Novik, whose Temeraire series is about the Napoleanic War, told from the point of view of a former navy officer who’s now in their aerial corps, which is mounted on dragons. It is a fundamentally and foundationally military tale. … And the dragons send ripples [through society]. For example, Longwings—which are a very powerful dragon, because they can spit acid—are a key part of the British military, and a key asset to winning the war. But Longwings will only accept female captains. So now you have to let women in the military, and because the captain of a dragon is like the captain of a ship—it’s a very senior rank, the equivalent of a colonel, and it’s a gateway to the admiralty in the aerial corps—women’s status in society is completely in flux at the time of these books, and Naomi Novik deals with it brilliantly and convincingly.”

Weston Ochse on the SEAL Team 666 series:

“I heard that Dwayne Johnson, when he got the first script, it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of a military unit, kind of a black comedy, and he turned it down, he said, ‘Absolutely not.’ He said—and I can’t believe I’m saying this with my ‘out loud’ voice—he said, ‘I want it the way Weston wrote the book,’ which is kind of awesome. But the reason I did that is because I wanted every single military person who read that to be able to acknowledge, ‘OK, this is real. This is what’s happening. And boy, isn’t it nice that rather than shooting at this enemy, we’re actually trying to puzzle out how to defeat this Chinese demon.’ … Sometimes, if it’s a lower demon, it’s just a matter of the amount of lead you can pour into them, but other times, no matter how much you fire at them, nothing’s going to happen. And a lot of times these guys have to learn on the fly what’s going to work, or they’re going to die.”

“The Institute of Combat Stress reprinted it, and I’ve heard from a number of military doctors who are using it in recovery groups. I wish my fiction was this popular! That really resonated with people. And that was one of those blog posts that scared the crap out of me to post, because I didn’t know how people were going to react, because I’m basically turning to this huge medical establishment that has been acknowledging that this thing is a problem, and saying, ‘Yeah, you’re off base here. This is what I think is going on.’ And look, I’m not a doctor, and this is the kind of thing that needs somebody who can dedicate their life to it, but I do think it clearly resonated with people. And the basic idea is that it’s not a disease, it’s a permanent change in worldview, and it’s a small thing, but I think it’s pretty significant.”

If the Internet taught us one thing this week it’s that it pays to think about domain registrations in advance. Also, if you say or something stupid on the Internet, everyone will be ready to tell you about it. (But if you don’t know that what are you even doing here?) In a week where the world ended for One Directioners and censorship was defeated (well, almost), here is the pick of what you might have missed happening on the wacky world wide web.

Zayn Ruins the World

What Happened: Zayn Malik has left One Direction. It’s possible that that sentence might not have made any sense to you, in which case you should read on.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: For a large part of the Internet, the biggest news story of the week was Zayn Malik leaving One Direction, a decision that he’s since explained was down to his need to regain control of his life. The resulting wave of emotion flooding the Internet was so overwhelming some news organizations sought to contextualize it for older readers, or even try to explain why social media has changed fans’ interaction with pop music as a whole. There were even YouTube supercuts made up of fans’ responses (see above).

The Takeaway: Will Zayn turn out to be a Robbie or a Geri? Only time will tell. Probably as much time as it takes for most of you to realize what the hell we’re talking about.

Taylor Swift Does What We Would All Do, Given The Chance

What Happened: Taylor Swift is buying up porn domains, but that doesn’t mean she’s planning on extending her conquest of the entertainment industry.

Where It Blew Up: Blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Starting June 1, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will expand the number of generic top-level domains (or gTLDs) available to the public—meaning that .com and .net will be joined by new suffixes like .sucks and .deals—and the 1989 singer is apparently already prepared for the world that’s coming. She’s already purchased taylorswift.porn and taylorswift.adult, launching araftofexcitedcoverage eager for the clickbait of putting the words “Taylor Swift” and “porn” in the same headline. While what she did was smart, she wasn’t unique in this kind of planning ahead; other companies are doing the same thing. Apparently, she wasn’t able to buy taylorswift.sucks, however, because it’s for sale by a source other than ICANN. She’s probably safe, though, because who really thinks that Taylor sucks these days?

The Takeaway: Someone on Taylor’s management team is thinking ahead. It’ll be interesting to see which other celebrities follow suit—and which ones will have been beaten to the punch by enterprising potential porn moguls.

Ted Cruz May Be Ready For The Highest Office In The Land, But He Clearly Wasn’t Ready For The Internet

What Happened: Republican Ted Cruz announced that he was running for president, although a quick Google search might confuse you about that “Republican” tag.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Ted Cruz, the junior US senator from Texas, announced he would be running for president in 2016 this week, but you wouldn’t know that if you visited TedCruz.com, which bears the text “Support President Obama. Immigration Reform Now!” Maybe you should visit TedCruzForAmerica.com … except that site redirects to HealthCare.gov. It turned out that Democratic supporters had registered the domains ahead of time, as well as TedCruz.ca and TedCruz.tumblr.com, much to the amusementofpoliticos.

The Takeaway: Clearly, someone on the Cruz campaign should have taken a lesson from Taylor Swift’s team. Hey, maybe TedCruz.porn is available…?

Racism Is Alive and Well and On Entertainment News Sites, Who Knew?

What Happened: Only 30 years after the phenomenal success of The Cosby Show, television is finally waking up to the fact not everyone is white. According to one industry website, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: To the surprise of … well, everyone, probably, Hollywood news site Deadline published a story arguing white actors are having a hard time of it in TV thanks to the success of shows like Empire and Blackish. The response was instant on social media:

The non-immediate response was sizable, as well, with think piecespointingouthowoffensiveitwas. Deadline has yet to properly respond to the criticism, although its Twitter account retweeted many negative tweets the day after the story ran.

The Takeaway: The whole thing is an impressive amount of wrong-headedness on behalf of Deadline, but it’ll be a while yet before we see if there’s any real fallout, other than people shaking their heads. If not, who knows? Bigotry to get outrage clicks might be the next big thing.

Make Those Dirty Books Clean with One Simple Censorship App

What Happened: If you’ve found yourself bothered by people writing things you don’t want to read, maybe you’d be interested in Clean Reader, an app that censors books to the satisfaction of even the most restrictive mind.* (*This is probably not true.)

The charge against the app was successful. Clean Reader removed all titles from its online catalog on Friday, ahead of a planned update and relaunch that, the company claims, will “be in response to the feedback we have received from many authors and users.”

The Takeaway: We’re torn on this, to be honest. On the one hand, our anti-censorship stance had us thinking this is terrible from the get-go, but on the other hand, it’s not as if the uncensored books aren’t readily available elsewhere. Ultimately, let’s just put this in the “Unless You’re Amazingly Sensitive, What’s the Point of This?” file.

Ask A Silly Question…

What Happened: SeaWorld, in an attempt to convince the universe that it isn’t a terrible organization that hurts animals as some would have you believe, told the Internet that it would answer their questions. As you might expect, this turned out to be a bad PR move.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter

What Really Happened: Oh, SeaWorld. Considering the reputation you have, you think you’d know better than to try and repair the damage to your name by inviting questions on Twitter. And yet, apparently not. Predictably, it didn’t go well.

The Takeaway: Quite why anyone at SeaWorld would have thought this was, in any way, a good idea is beyond us, but hopefully they’ve learned their lesson.

The below story, “Rules of Enchantment,” appears in Operation Arcana, a new anthology of military fantasy I edited. It was released March 3 by Baen Books.

‘Rules of Enchantment’

by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

You’d think arrows are pretty silent compared to gunfire, but there’s no mistaking that bristly whistle as it whips through the air just past your head before it thwacks into someone’s Kevlar. Everyone eats dirt, and you’re checking your ammo with your back against a tree trunk wondering how the wood elves flanked you when you realize how stupid a question that is: this is their territory.

You’re new to the squad, so you’re still nervous. Every crack in the brush and shaken leaf has you jumpy. We’ve all been teasing you. Rookie this and rookie that.

I’m about fifteen feet away. I can see that your face is pale and shaken, but you have your rifle cradled and ready, looking for orders. The rest of the squad is spread out. Diaz is pulling an arrow out from his body armor and looking a bit chagrined. Orley is slowly crawling through dirt; he’s got a bead on the shooter. “Sergeant: got eyes on the woodie,” he reports.

“Hold,” I order.

This is the rendezvous point. But we’re dressed in robes that make us look like peasant travelers. I can feel Orley objecting already to the suspicion in my head, but even though our minds are all linked up into one single group mind via the Spell of Tactician’s Weave, only one of us is still in charge.

Diaz forms up a memory. A story he was told about a couple of African-American special forces who stumbled in out of the night with bows and arrows. Scouts setting out to blend into the local land. They ended up getting shot by jumpy sentries on the way back in who thought they were orcs.

Diaz is half-black. The realization that some people see black skin, bows, and right away think orc and go straight to trigger-pulling leaves a bad taste in all our mouths.

Teachable moment about making assumptions aside—and believe me, Diaz has laid plenty of those thanks to the intimacy of the Tactician’s Weave—Orley gets Diaz’s point and eases up. Now everyone’s on board with my line of thought: that the elves are looking at us and seeing the Enemy, not US Marines.

We all shrug off the cloaks, displaying our standard Marine Corps digi-cammies and gear. My staff sergeant insignia is quite visible, making me the high-ranking target. I narrow my eyes at the shadows.

A bird whistle from the tree canopy pierces the air. They’d had us marked from the get go.

Shit.

If it wasn’t for body armor, Diaz would have been a bloody piñata. And you, rookie, would have gotten a nasty surprise from up above.

Yeah, look above your head, rookie. That grinning visage looking down the bark of the tree is a wood elf. Remember what they taught you about high ground? That includes firs. You need to be better about your situational awareness; clear up and down, not just the two dimensional plane.

But I have to smile, because the challenge-and-answer is rolling through your mind like a mantra. At least you kept calm and didn’t forget that.

“Cheshire!” I shout.

“Alice,” comes the reply, in purring tones, from the wood elf above you. Good to go.

“Hello the shooters!” I shout. “First Battalion, Ninth Marines.” You should know by now I always say something different. You should look up 1/9 and the stand at the Low Gorge Keep when we get back to the world. “You’re expecting us? We’re here for the Lady Wíela.”

The new silence stretches on for a bit. You fidget, glancing away from the wood elf crouched on the tree above you into the foliage. More of the elves’ small, childlike humanoid forms melt out from the shadows, their small bows slung on their backs, their hands resting on the hilts of knives. They are skeletal and lean, chiseled teeth glinting as they look us over with cold eyes.

“I’m Achur. I have protected the Lady this far. Do you have the writ?” The elf above you speaks again, dropping nimbly from the tree.

I hold up the papyrus, and the symbols on it glitter, then blaze as the elf’s eyes pass over them. Achur swallows, then nods. “The Lady is in your care.”

And just like that, they melt back away. All that remains is a young woman in a cloak as black as the shadows, her green eyes peeking out from under the hood.

Lady Wíela.

Diaz and Orley bow deeply toward her, as they’ve been taught by battalion S-3 and the cultural liaison gurus. I’m about to do so when your radio crackles. It’s First Squad—Stormcrow—laid out two miles farther into enemy territory. “You’ve got three trolls, Longshanks,” they report. “Headed your way like they know something’s up.”

None of us had heard anything, but we’d been focused on the attacking wood elves and could have missed the distant popcorn sound of gunfire. “Engage and slow them down, we have the package,” I say into the handset, then strain to hear their reply.

“They’re already past us, Longshanks,” First Squad reports. “Two dead. I’ve already called for a med-evac, and we might be pinned down. I’d be calling you for help if—”

A brief burst of static.

“Stormcrow?”

Nothing. Dead or moving, but it doesn’t matter to us just now.

Orley thinks he can hear the sound of wood cracking. Diaz is sure he can feel a distant thudding. I’m half convinced I can as well.

“Trolls,” you say, trying to remember your all-too-brief training before suiting up and coming through the breach.

“They’ll be weak in the daylight. We just have to make it through the night,” Lady Wíela says, as if reassuring us. Or maybe it’s herself she’s trying to convince. It’s hard to say: her face is buried deep in the shadows of her cowl. None of us find it easy to get a good look at her features.

“Right,” I say. “Get them to daylight.” But the whole squad, linked to your mind, can tell exactly what you’re thinking: that it’ll be a miracle if we all make it through the night.

Antoine taps you with a Wand of Night Seeing and we’re off, rolling through the woods at double-time. You’re on point, like a good little newbie, your rifle half raised as you scan the woods in front of us. You’ll never be a night elf—none of us can ever be that good—but the bottled spell gives you a good look at the terrain as we bust through it.

At this point, we have to figure anyone with half a lick of sense knows we’re dragging a shit ton of trouble behind us in the shape of three trolls. Anyone in front of us basically wants to get trampled, if they’re hanging around. Doesn’t stop you from jumping at every flickery shadow, though.

Plus, we can all sense you’re feeling the sting of letting that wood elf get the jump on you and you’re itching to prove yourself.

“Jotun,” I mutter to you. Be cool.

Cool as a frost giant.

The woods open up in front of you, which we all know is both good and bad; we have better visibility, but then so does anyone looking for us. And whatever advantage we had flitting between the trees where the trolls had to crash through would be lost in the more open ground. But if anything could make up for it, it was the view.

As you hustle down off the ridgeline, running along just below the crest, the trees thin out and you can see the Medju Gorge, the twisted frontier between the wood elves’ home and the land of the orcs. I’m glancing at the tortured rock formations rising up like blackened souls trying to escape Hell, each larger, more misshapen, and unnatural than the last. The gorge deepens and widens, and the formations grow more massive. Almost anything could be hiding in there, Orley thinks.

The ridge you’re running along slopes down toward the rim of the gorge, and the plan forms in our minds almost at once. Pros and cons shoot back and forth without the need for pleasantries or protocol as fast as the thoughts form. Within moments we’re moving into position for a hasty ambush.

You stop and curl back, the rest of first team following you; you have the unenviable job of bait. But you’re going to start in the beaten zone, so we think your run to safety will be short and the trolls will be distracted with other things—like stampeding off a cliff. As the ridge slopes down, the flat ground between it and the edge of the gorge narrows, and you and your team start trotting in small circles in an area where there’s only about fifty meters of flat, sparsely treed ground between the ridge’s steep slope and the gorge.

You feel them before you hear them, and hear them before you see them. The ground shakes and thuds first, the earth itself reacting to the trolls. Then you hear it—the trees cracking, metal jangling, grunting and snorting of the biggest, dumbest animals on two legs. Trees wave and topple, and then they lumber into view, massive arms and legs swinging through the foliage, then huge bodies tearing through. Your mind has a hard time with it, even through the unreal vision of Night Seeing. Videos from the first Rangers through the breach was one thing—gunsight cameras another—but this almost burns out your brain.

Good thing we’re here too. Other than coordination, this is the thing Tactician’s Weave is good for. We push you through the initial shock. As one your team raises their weapons and fires. You’re not trying to bring down the trolls—only enrage them, draw them right into the beaten zone.

It works, of course. They’re big dumb animals. But we all notice just how ineffective your fire is, and the plan starts to make less sense. Still, we’re committed.

“This is a bad idea,” Lady Wíela hisses just as you and your team start to move, spraying three-round bursts back at the lumbering beasts.

“Yep, we know,” I say and bring my rifle up. There’s a HEDP—High Explosive, Dual Purpose—grenade in the tube slung under the barrel, and I’m hoping it does the trick.

“You won’t get me back to your world this way,” Lady Wíela says.

“We won’t get you anywhere if we don’t try to shake these assholes.”

They cross the line, and whatever else she might be saying is drowned in a cacophony of fire. Our three automatic weapons open up, concentrating on the closest troll. Actual night-vision goggles help us, but they’re not as good as the spell you’re under. We see greenish lumps, fragments of huge bodies, and the bright, actinic sparks of tracer rounds seeking them out and pinging off their impossibly thick hides.

One staggers into view and I take the shot, angling up my rifle and popping off the grenade. The rifle butt smacks me in the shoulder, and I admire the shot for a moment—just like they say you shouldn’t—but it’s a perfect arc and nails the troll in its squat neck.

We all admire it, and then we scatter like camouflage cockroaches when the light turns on.

The trolls wig out, big time. The one I hit, he finally breaks and does a runner right toward the gorge. The other two start flailing around, maddened, completely lost. While that’s great for us trying to boogie out, it’s shit for us trying to do so in one piece. Tree limbs and rocks and clods of dirt the size of your chest start flying through the air. Marcel gets hit by a shattered tree trunk and goes down, run through with a couple of big shards of bole wood.

You grab him by the drag strap on the back of his vest and start to move through the woods. You might have been one of the biggest Tolkien nerds in your boot-camp platoon, but you were also one of the strongest.

We like you like that.

“Leave him,” Wíela hisses as we try to regroup. She’s stayed by my side through the ambush. “He will only slow us down, and the trolls’ madness will pass. They will hunt us again.”

“We do not leave a Marine behind!”

“You jeopardize this mission!” she cries. “And the whole war besides! Your people have stopped the invasion into your world, but you are barely keeping your enemies from staying on this side. I am the key to the alliance your forces need.”

There is no denying that we’ve been stuck in a morass ever since pushing through to the other side, and you know it as well as any of us. You watched it on TV, on the Internet, through shaky YouTube videos and live Tweets. When the rifts opened, we didn’t even know it was happening. At first, it was just tiny pockets where two worlds touched. But they grew wider, reaching beyond the woods and back alleys and caves where they first appeared. And just as we started to investigate, they poured out.

You wouldn’t think—no one thought—that a bunch of creatures out of the storybooks could stand up for long against cops, much less the Army or Marines, but they made a fight out of it the world will never forget. Or maybe the world will, given enough time. Maybe it will fade to legends and fairytales and great big hairy operas by the descendants of the Germans. One thing’s for sure: everyone started looking at those old stories differently when orcs started beheading joggers in Central Park and trolls destroyed the Empire State Building.

When we stopped the invasion and pushed through the fissures, we allied quickly with beings like the wood elves and humans like Lady Wíela, who were our allies and friends in the old stories.

Which is why we were on the edge of the wood elves’ territory, running from trolls.

“We know what’s at stake,” I tell her. “We know you have information the brass is hot and heavy for.” She seems to be some sort of royalty on this side of the rift, and we’re the anonymous security team delivering her to the safe location.

We know our role.

We don’t stop moving, trying to form back up as we leave the thrashing noise of the trolls behind us. We take advantage of the bond that Tactician’s Weave brings us and keep moving generally toward the objective.

“You don’t know what’s really at stake,” she says, her voice rising in pitch and volume. “You haven’t the first idea.”

“You could just tell us,” Orley says, interrupting.

“I can only speak to your leaders. And if you knew why, you would know we have no time to drag around the dying.”

It’s clear she’s not going to tell us peons anything. “He’s not dying; he’ll be fine if we get him to a surgeon soon.” We figure she has no idea that people could actually recover from wounds like that, much less survive them, without some intense magic. But still, the charitable understanding is hard to come by.

“We will all die if we do not get to safety and soon.”

I smile as you come across a deep draw cutting across our path that drains down into the ravine. “We’ll get there,” I say.

You pick your way down the near slope of the gully, checking left and right like a good newbie should. You’re rattled from that first encounter with the trolls, but you’re also taking pride in having survived it, and having had the presence of mind all on your own to grab Marcel and drag him out of the killzone. Heath and Lomicka are carrying him now, groaning on one of our collapsible litters. They’ll have a tough time getting down and back up the other side, but they can see your steps, your route, and pick their own way down from what they’ve seen through your eyes.

The sounds of the trolls still behind us somewhere spooks you, and you nearly squeeze off a round in panic. But we steady you again, remind you we want the trolls to follow us, and you press on. You pick your way across the gully floor slowly, eyeing the sharp rise on the far side. Lady Wíela has graciously informed us of a dry streambed that rises more gradually out the other side, and you pick up her landmarks and start moving toward them. The direction takes you down and west, closer toward that nightmare rift, where the draw empties out. Some of us think we can hear shrieks … or maybe it’s just the wind whistling over those rock formations.

“Fuckin’ eerie,” Ysbarra mutters. She spits at the ground and hefts her SAW, taking comfort in the cold metal of the light machine gun in her hands.

This could, really, be anywhere on Earth. Back home. Back in the world. The same sorts of weeds and scrub poke up through the same sorts of rocks. The air, we all think, smells a little sweeter in the forest we just came from, and a little fouler up ahead where we don’t want to go.

So as long as there aren’t any invisible caves, or crystal staircases, or anything else weird, we should be good to go for the next attempt at an ambush. It’s not that we want to stop and fight the trolls, it’s that we don’t have much choice. From here it’s a straight shot back to our bivouac, and little else but open ground between us and the relative safety of the Forward Operating Base. Either the trolls run us down in the open ground, or we drag them all the way back to the FOB with us and hope the Marines there are up to the task.

It’s a bullshit buffet, and we’ve got to pick something to eat.

“Wish we had a couple Gamgees with us,” I mutter.

“What?” Lady Wíela asks.

“SAMs,” I explain, realizing she isn’t following. “Surface to Air Missiles.”

But she’s no less mystified.

“Think they’d stop a troll?” you ask.

I shrug. “Couldn’t hurt…”

We follow you down, keeping up our dispersion, all of us trying to ignore the thudding in the distance. The trolls have gotten their shit together and could well be on our trail again. The sound of them certainly isn’t growing any fainter.

The good Lady is chirping at my shoulder about moving faster, but she answers the questions I put to her, however reluctantly. She sees the wisdom in our plan, however far short of ideal it may be, but she is not happy about it, and her nervousness grows with the sound of the trolls.

You set up in overwatch once you reach a shallow enough part of the streambed, scrambling up the side and back toward the steep edge of the gully. You perch on top just as the litter bearers make it down the far slope with Marcel between them. Sighting through the scope on your rifle, the landscape is laid out, the trees thinning to nothing on the opposite side, and treetops swaying as the trolls plod through.

We start setting up while we watch through your eyes, measuring distance and time and need. It’s easier this time, picking out their flailing limbs and misshapen bodies, the thinning of the forest giving you more space to see. Still, the fully glimpsed form of them is just as terrifying as the half-glimpsed pieces.

“Damn,” you mutter.

They are almost as broad as they are tall, but not fat as such—just thick. Squat necks with lumpy heads atop them, huge swaying arms that brush the ground as they lope along. Their hands are barely hands at all, almost just clubs on the ends of their arms. But it’s not like they need much more than that.

You can only see two, which gives you hope that one of them did, indeed, panic himself right off a cliff. We’re preparing for three anyway, not that it makes much difference: more than one stretches our resources to the breaking point. We have six kilos of C4, two collapsible anti-tank rockets, a dozen or so grenades, and a dwindling supply of regular ol’ bullets. We arrange things as best we can, and once again dangle some bait for them.

This time, Lady Wíela herself volunteers. I tell her no, but she is insistent. We’d hate to do all this just to lose her, but she won’t be put off. “You have the weapons,” she points out. “If any of you steps away from your post, you reduce our fighting power. I’m your best option.”

She’s right. And if the trolls don’t bite, we’re fucked either way. We’ve been calling for backup—air support, or advice from up the food chain. But there’s static in the air. Errant spells. Energy from the rift. Who knows? We seem to be on our own.

So we set up and there is no mistaking it now; the ground is shaking, the trees are swaying and there is no chance that it’s a column of tanks rolling through to pick us up—they’re still having problems stockpiling enough diesel on this side of the rifts to make it work.

We hustle to improvise some claymores and set up Brust and Antoine on the opposite side of the dry streambed from you with their anti-tank rockets.

Lady Wíela paces through a small section of cleared ground in the middle of the gully. You keep looking from her to the treeline and back again, feeling personally responsible for her safety even though we’ve taken that on as a squad. You still haven’t worked out that team-mind thing, but we know you will; we all had to work at it at one point or another.

A lot of fantasy nerds got it in their heads that they were the next Aragorn—the movie Aragorn, no less—hacking their way through legions of orcs with a big fucking sword and a bad shave. Lotta assholes got killed that way, in and out of uniform. You’re not one of those assholes. You’re a solid part of the team. You’ve been through the training, paid some dues. Now it’s time to see how it really gets done on the ground.

So you don’t let yourself linger on the Lady, however good she looks in that gown-and-cloak number. No Cate Blanchett, but still easy on the eyes. Besides, when your brain wanders like that you can feel Ysbarra’s annoyance at the off-mission male-gaze focus like a swift ruler crack to the knuckles. Save that shit for your bunk.

And when the trolls break through, you’re all business. You estimate the ranges and we read them right off the top of your consciousness. Too close. Far too close.

“Lady Wíela!” you shout, and the Lady looks at your pointed hand. They’re at the crest, near where we came down, towering above.

She screams, getting their attention, and starts to run.

We make a decision and Brust pulls the trigger. An unguided rocket lances out in a tight spiral. It blossoms orange just under the armpit of one of the trolls, causing it to bellow in rage.

“He ain’t too fucking happy about that,” I say.

From what Brust can see, we’re thinking we seem to have finally injured one of them—slightly.

“Nah,” you report. “I think we just really, really pissed it off.”

It bellows again, and an answering roar comes from down toward the ravine. Fuck, I think, spreading alarm out through everyone.

We scope the end of the gully and see the big dark shape of the third troll lumbering up the gully toward us. It must have gone down into the ravine but continued to follow us and climbed up to try to flank. We would not have given them that much credit for coordination, and maybe it was just a happy accident (for them). “Who cares if it’s an accident,” Antoine hisses. “We are supremely fucked.”

And the Lady is close to being trapped. “Reel her up,” I order. We’re not going to lose her.

You grab the 550-pound test-cord loop from your gear and fling it over the edge of the gully after tying off one end to your vest. If she can get to that, she can climb up, maybe, and you’re torn between firing at the trolls to drive them off and trying to make like a bump in the grass, hoping they get more excited about Brust and his spent rocket launcher.

We solve it for you when Antoine fires on the other troll, hoping to draw them away. But no matter what we do, we’ve got more trolls than we can deal with and a lot of open ground behind us.

Antoine’s distraction works, though that means all three trolls are now keying on Brust and Antoine. They are theoretically out of reach on the lip of the gully, but suddenly the walls don’t look so high.

And then the radio crackles. Fuzzy and fractured, but recognizable.

“Longshanks, Longshanks, this is Windlord, we are one mike out from your beacon, what’s your sitch?”

We somehow refrain from cheering.

“Windlord, this is Longshanks actual,” I shout into the radio handset. “Three brutes, danger close, bring the thunder!”

“Thunder, aye. Hold on to your butts, Longshanks. Windlord out.”

You look up and to the west, and you can see them, a flight of four sparks in the distance, but closing, growing quickly. You scramble to the lip of the gully and shout down at the Lady. She hurries toward you, broken from her fear, and starts scrambling toward the dangling cord. She finds it and loops it under her arms, tying it off in front of her. Then she starts to climb, and you take up the slack, taking weight off of her.

“What is it?” she shouts, seeing that I’m looking over my shoulder into the air.

“A dragon?”

“Even better,” I shout down at her. “Warthogs!”

She frowns—not sure how a pig might be able to save our bacon right now—as the Warthogs arrive.

They’re ugly and beautiful-almost-ancient jets made for a different war. Their huge rotary cannons, mounted under the cockpit, were designed to plow 30mm depleted-uranium rounds into Soviet tanks and armored vehicles in support of ground troops like us. The planes themselves are actually armored, and as they dive on the gully you can see the cluster bombs and anti-armor rockets slung under the wings.

The trolls look up just as four gouts of flame erupt from the planes, each stream of phosphorescent rounds looking like a laser beam. Two of the Warthogs loose rockets, and explosions rock the gully. We all drop flat, and you’re thrown down, back as you come to an appreciation of what “danger close” really means. The heat of the explosions washes over you, singeing the grass, reddening your exposed skin, and the weight on the line goes heavy.

The trolls bellow and cry and scream, and it all mingles with the cacophony of the Warthogs’ attack. They seem to be stampeding to the ravine, to the frontier with the dark lands, and two of the Warthogs overfly them while the other two circle back around and strafe them again to make the point. One of the trolls actually falls and does not stir.

“Fuck yeah!” someone says. Or maybe we all do. Hard to tell.

You grab hold and start hauling on the line again. Lady Wíela is still on it, but heavy, not assisting you. Fantasy nerds who’d been through boot camp knew that their gaming stats had real world counterparts, and you went in big on your Strength and Constitution. Hand over hand you pull her up the side of the gully.

We all pick ourselves up, several limps and cuts and bruises, but nothing to keep us from hoofing the last few miles. We hurry over to where you are, where you’re pulling the Lady Wíela up over the lip of the gully.

I’m hoping she’s not dead. Really, really hoping. But you see her as you drag her over the lip and relax slightly. She’s unconscious, blood down the side of her face, but she takes several deep breaths as we watch. Antoine gets down to check her out and pronounces her alive, but he’s muttering, “This ain’t right,” over and over again.

We all take in the state of her cloak and gown, torn and shredded by the trip up the rocky wall of the gully. Her skin is gray and mottled beneath, no match for the pale face and blond hair showing above her shoulders.

Not human.

Her face and hands are a glamour, I realize. A magical disguise meant to fool us.

Or someone.

Orley draws his sidearm, ready to put two between her eyes, but you grab his wrist and push the weapon back.

We see it clear in your mind. Diaz’s story about the two black Special Forces guys riddled with bullets because the sentries had mistaken them for orcs. The lady’s disguise was not going to survive a trip to Washington, so she knew she would be unmasked long before she got anywhere the surprise might do her any good.

“She’s an orc, but she’s here to help us,” you say aloud. “I don’t think she dangled herself out there as troll bait for nothing. She’s a friendly. And, I’m guessing, an important one.”

After a moment, Diaz nods and grabs the second collapsible litter off of Antoine’s back and unfolds it. We get Wíela on it, and, as the Warthogs make one final strafing run along the gully, we start hoofing it for friendlier territory.

Forward Operating Base Hammerhand sits perched on a bare sweep of rocky soil, just on the frontier of the High Elves’ sacred forest. Dawn breaks as the big Osh-Kosh truck crawls up from the Entry Control Point down on the plain proper. As we crest the rise, we can see the Seven Sisters Falls, sparkling in the morning sun, pouring out from the sacred forest and into the river we all call “Binky” because none of us can pronounce its real name.

As soon as we’re stopped, Antoine hauls Marcel off the back of the truck and two more corpsmen come running up. Together, they all hustle off to the Combat Support Hospital. An aircrew and some officer, meanwhile, come fetch Lady Wíela. The officer, at least, doesn’t look surprised at the mottled gray skin showing under her torn clothing.

“Fucking figures,” you say. And for once, we don’t give you a hard time. That’s hard-won knowledge—the fact that sometimes you’re a mushroom: kept in the dark and fed orders.

Tactician’s Weave is wearing off and we’re all starting to fall back into our own heads, but we don’t really need it to make some decisions together. Dropping off the back of the truck we haul our weary bodies out to the eastern end of the FOB, looking out over the forest and falls and the faint hint of golden spires away over the forest canopy.

We shuck our gear, bodies steaming with sweat evaporating in the cool morning air. As we settle in, the CH-53 Sea Stallion lifts off its pad at the western end of the base and forms up with two Cobra gunships already orbiting the base. They leg it north at top speed, and we wish them luck. Flying through the rifts is nowhere near as easy as walking or driving.

“It ain’t D&D rules, that’s for sure,” you say, leaning back on your gear. Like some salty vet, you’ve already broken down your M-16 and gotten out your cleaning kit, the pieces settled on your lap. We’re all following suit, of course, even those of us who didn’t get off a shot.

We all laugh. We’re all nerds of some stripe or another, and most of us rolled those dice before taking the chances we do now. But reality’s not as simple as those worlds we conceived. All of those guys did tap into something real, as it turns out, some ancient memories of the world when those rifts opened and the weird and scary and monstrous poured out, populating our nightmares and fairy tales for millennia.

“So did those elves sell us out?” Ysbarra asks, leaning over her SAW to disassemble the light machine gun.

“What do you think?” Diaz replies. “Those trolls were aimed right at us. They delivered their package, got paid, and then got paid for telling the other side where the package was.”

“It’s fucking complicated,” I say. “Just like the ‘Stan, just like Iraq. I was in both places. I saw how fucked up it could be, even back there. No surprise it’s the same here.”

You look over the sacred forest, the lands of our allies, frowning a little. We can read the thought on your face, don’t need to see into your mind.

“And no—no guarantees they can be trusted, either,” I say. “But if we trust each other and think things through, we’ll be alright.”

That’s how it’s been done through all the long years, you figure, since trolls and goblins first walked out of our nightmares, and the many wars since. If we hold off the darkness together, that’s how it’ll go this time, too. Maybe this time we won’t forget it all to legend.